There are a lot of worldviews out there that I respect, as internally consistent worldviews, if not as actual truth.
However, there is one ideology that is steeped in simple bullshit.
Rationalist Agnosticism, is a muddled tangle of hoity-toity ideas rolled together by a conglomerate of rebellious college students, seeking to demonstrate their independence from the ideologies of their upbringing, and limp-wristed, octogenarian book-philosophers, who are more interested in promoting tolerance of beliefs than actually expanding human understanding. Occasional interesting exceptions crop up, but for the most part they are the dumping grounds for all the most obnoxiously boring philosophers in the world.
What really annoys me is that Rationalist Agnosticism claims to do the impossible; it claims to construct a worldview free from the confines of belief. Belief is the foundation of the understanding from which we contextualize our experiences of the world. Belief is not a cage for our minds, but the skeleton that gives them shape.
In reality, the rationalist agnostic accepts so little as self-evident, that he is able to fool himself into believing he has accepted nothing. Nevertheless, the ideas of the vanilla bland adherent take on a fairly consistent shape, that quickly reveals the underlying structure.
Rationalism, is founded in a number core assumptions that I consider to be perfectly valid. (The things I see with my eyes, with rare exception, do exist. etc. Other people actually exist, and their observations can be combined with yours to form a more complete mental model of the world as it is. etc.) These core assumptions of rationalism remain steadfastly rooted in the cannon of a force that purports to assume nothing.
It is this hypocrisy that so makes my blood boil. An ideology that denies all belief, except for those it explicitly endorses, isn't tolerant simply because it poo-poos at all outside ideas equally. It is arrogant, intolerant and foolish to assume your set of starting assumptions is inherently superior, without allowing for the consideration of other options.
Where is the humility and courage to discard the existing model, that once gave rationalism the power to terrify the halls of power? Where is the passion that drove Galileo to step away from the herd, stop milling about the approved manuscripts of academia, and look to the stars? This watered down, cowardly elitism, that refuses to acknowledge the possibility of anything relevant existing beyond the scope of ones own field, is a grave disservice to all the great rational minds who have gone before.
The universe is still vast, mysterious and dangerous. Has mankind simply lost the courage to peek out from the warm blanket of his assumption and the the terrible truths lurking at it's heart?
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Judges Extending Their Influence
I'm a big fan of the idea of judicial review. When congress exceeds the bounds of their constitutional authority, somebody needs to be around with the power to stop them, without burning down the capitol building.
The trouble with judicial review is that it is an unsupported mod, hacked into the system post release, and it's actually pretty buggy. Any time a judge refuses to enforce an unjust law, he's technically exceeding the bounds of his own constitutionally granted authority.
There's nothing wrong with that, but there are a lot of judges who are trying to abuse this mod to cheat. Take Joel Rosenburg's fight against Minnesota judges, over court orders banning weapons, in situations the law explicitly allows them, among other shady practices.
To the judge who signed this order: Perhaps there do need to be different regulations about civilians carrying firearms into city hall, sir, but for you to take on the power of a one man legislature and simply speak a new set of rules into existence is unacceptable. Are you a judge or a king?
The icing on the cake is that this is just one battle in a larger battle, over how much power a judge should hold over your life. Here's hoping that Rosenburg's fight is the pivotal battle that turn the tides of war.
What is congress doing in the face of such unmitigated bullshit? They're considering giving federal judges the power to censor the internet. Seriously, what are they thinking?
In my previous post, I said that COICA is a bad and sloppy law. This is why. It's a nebulously written piece of legislation that gives judges the power to strike from the DNS any website "dedicated to infringement." Now the heart of this law is the intent of making enforceable the DMCA, and as much as I detest the DMCA, I can't fault the good intentions behinds cutting off the supply of hacked .exes for pirated games.
However, depending on the version of this law that gets passed it could be used to shut down sites that speak out in favor of piracy, at the request of any videogame publisher who cares to lodge a complaint. Even if they never actually manage to shut anyone down, the potential cooling effect could do tremendous harm. If a website could be shut down for criticizing copyright laws, is Google going to let guys like me keep using their Blogger service, when it means risking the entire Blogger system could end up on the blacklist? It's never good when one of the things a law suppresses is the right of the people to discuss that same law.
It's not just America either. England and Japan are enacting new censorship laws right now too. The boogeyman used to declare this move necessarily in these cases is the availability of porn to children. Now, I don't believe children should be looking at porn, and maybe it's about time Japan got some broadcast regulations (the fanservice has been getting more obtrusive in recent years), but this thing in England is just bullshit.
The English government will draw up a list of websites that local ISPs will be obliged to block, unless the customer specifically requests the entire list be unblocked. The people of England can read whatever they want, so long as they are willing to go on record that they want porn piped into their houses. This is a system of information restriction with built in issue clouding.
It's a trap, baited with the promise that the UK can somehow track down every porn site on the internet and add it to a handy list. Even if they could accomplish such a feat, the cost of keeping such a list up to date would be absurd. It's much more cost effective for the taxpayers to monitor their child's internet access, or get some blocking software on their own end.
"Oi! Mind yer own business, yank!" I hear you cry. It is my business; regardless of how this turns out, there's bound to be someone on this side of the pond, who thinks it could be made to work here.
In any country in the world, you will always find rats in the government, and as with any rat infestation, the best solution is to not leave out a single crumb for them. If these laws pass, you can expect the precedent to be used to put forward even more restrictive legislation.
The trouble with judicial review is that it is an unsupported mod, hacked into the system post release, and it's actually pretty buggy. Any time a judge refuses to enforce an unjust law, he's technically exceeding the bounds of his own constitutionally granted authority.
There's nothing wrong with that, but there are a lot of judges who are trying to abuse this mod to cheat. Take Joel Rosenburg's fight against Minnesota judges, over court orders banning weapons, in situations the law explicitly allows them, among other shady practices.
To the judge who signed this order: Perhaps there do need to be different regulations about civilians carrying firearms into city hall, sir, but for you to take on the power of a one man legislature and simply speak a new set of rules into existence is unacceptable. Are you a judge or a king?
The icing on the cake is that this is just one battle in a larger battle, over how much power a judge should hold over your life. Here's hoping that Rosenburg's fight is the pivotal battle that turn the tides of war.
What is congress doing in the face of such unmitigated bullshit? They're considering giving federal judges the power to censor the internet. Seriously, what are they thinking?
In my previous post, I said that COICA is a bad and sloppy law. This is why. It's a nebulously written piece of legislation that gives judges the power to strike from the DNS any website "dedicated to infringement." Now the heart of this law is the intent of making enforceable the DMCA, and as much as I detest the DMCA, I can't fault the good intentions behinds cutting off the supply of hacked .exes for pirated games.
However, depending on the version of this law that gets passed it could be used to shut down sites that speak out in favor of piracy, at the request of any videogame publisher who cares to lodge a complaint. Even if they never actually manage to shut anyone down, the potential cooling effect could do tremendous harm. If a website could be shut down for criticizing copyright laws, is Google going to let guys like me keep using their Blogger service, when it means risking the entire Blogger system could end up on the blacklist? It's never good when one of the things a law suppresses is the right of the people to discuss that same law.
It's not just America either. England and Japan are enacting new censorship laws right now too. The boogeyman used to declare this move necessarily in these cases is the availability of porn to children. Now, I don't believe children should be looking at porn, and maybe it's about time Japan got some broadcast regulations (the fanservice has been getting more obtrusive in recent years), but this thing in England is just bullshit.
The English government will draw up a list of websites that local ISPs will be obliged to block, unless the customer specifically requests the entire list be unblocked. The people of England can read whatever they want, so long as they are willing to go on record that they want porn piped into their houses. This is a system of information restriction with built in issue clouding.
It's a trap, baited with the promise that the UK can somehow track down every porn site on the internet and add it to a handy list. Even if they could accomplish such a feat, the cost of keeping such a list up to date would be absurd. It's much more cost effective for the taxpayers to monitor their child's internet access, or get some blocking software on their own end.
"Oi! Mind yer own business, yank!" I hear you cry. It is my business; regardless of how this turns out, there's bound to be someone on this side of the pond, who thinks it could be made to work here.
In any country in the world, you will always find rats in the government, and as with any rat infestation, the best solution is to not leave out a single crumb for them. If these laws pass, you can expect the precedent to be used to put forward even more restrictive legislation.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Cyberspace and COICA
Cyberspace is bull, and everyone with half a brain knows it.
It simply doesn't exist. There is no actual space that could potentially contain actual objects or people. It's not another dimension you can just travel to; this isn't like frikking Tron. Cyberspace is nothing but a tired metaphor that simply will not die.
The reality is that when you go out onto the internet you don't go anywhere, any more than one of your friends is literally elsewhere when they are "on the phone." This wondrous machine we call the Internet is just a bunch of people interacting via horrifying, new communications devices, built right into the common computer. Cyberspace doesn't exist, because all the stuff that happens there actually happens right there in the computer in front of you, and others like it. The internet is just like the real world, too tiny to see, to vast to imagine, and too mundane to respect properly, because the internet is part of the world we live in.
Nevertheless, there are a lot of people out there who like to think that the internet is a real place, and that it has a different set of laws from the land of meat, plastic and wire. Not all of these people are criminals, at least not in the sense that people tend to think of internet criminals. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure the rules should be the same, whether you do something in person, by mail, or via the internet. There are some lawmakers who disagree.
The real piece of bullshit for today is in the war on piracy, or more precisely, the way it's being carried out. This is about, ICE seizing 82 domains, under a single court order, and refusing to say why, how or for whom.
There is no way that the judge who signed off on this made an informed decision regarding each and every one of those sites. Nobody would sign a court order closing 82 distinct brick and mortar book stores (or more closely chains of bookstores), because some suit says he's investigating the possibility that some of them are moving counterfeit books or pirated movies. That would be the height of insanity. It is insanity.
While I'd be glad to see Torrent Finder squirm (not because they aid pirates, but because they go about it in a sleazy way), I cannot condone these actions taken against them. Not only because are there reports of innocent file sharing sites, dedicated to the legal exchange of legal content (independent or hobbyist artists trading songs like DeviantArt users do with drawings), getting caught in the blast of this legal artillery strike, but because they should be prosecuted lawfully for their actual crimes. Accusations of piracy have become the new accusations of communism, and some people would like to see this turn into the same kind of media circus witch-hunt.
The war on piracy is a guerrilla war, the kind you have to win with hearts and minds instead of good AoE DPS, and as despicable as it is for pirates to use legitimate commerce as human shields, the moment the ICE rolls out the heavy ordinance they become another kind of villain. When two teams of bad guys go head to head, ordinary people like you and me get to be the collateral damage. As civilized people we can come up with a cleaner solution to this problem, that doesn't involve harassing innocent citizens and invading our civil liberties, just to inconvenience some pirates.
That's right, just to inconvenience them. Torrent Search was right back to sleazing up the internet within hours, with a four letter difference in their URL. Their ad revenue is still flowing, and they still get hits in Google searches that aren't looking for them. I hope those free music sharing hippies have the good sense to also not bother fighting this ineffectual legal attack, as I doubt they have the money to battle a court order.
This is a stupid, sloppy way of doing things, and that's important, because it's about to become the normal way of doing things. The EFF has the worst case scenarios outlined, and if nobody takes an interest in finding a better way, you can expect one, or all, of these scenarios to come true.
The internet needs to not be some lawless wilderness where no officer has jurisdiction, and the federal government needs to take the initiative, what with the network stretching across state lines. I just want the people who decide how this goes down to not be so stupid about it. I know, too much to ask.
These laws should be written carefully. We should slowly introduce minor regulations that help proper law enforcement enforce the existing laws, and not be afraid to repeal laws that aren't working out. This is new technology, and it's going to take experimentation to find the right set of rules. The right set of rules is intuitively linked to the set of rules that govern the rest of human interaction, and they will be enforced in the same way.
The internet needs laws, but the internet needs good laws that protect the people who use it and the companies they work for, not laws that cause fear of censorship and government harassment, while letting the guilty walk free. Things like DMCA (in effect) and COICA (in congress) are shoddy laws that will empower bad cops. I've lived in places where bad cops ran free, and that isn't the kind of place you want the internet to turn into, even if the internet isn't really a place.
It was the same way with every other scary new way for the people to exchange ideas. Printing presses, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, video games, etc. Terrified reactionaries take the first go, with book burnings and wire taps, and then it falls to the sane people of Earth to clean up their mess and regulate this strange new technology. There are a lot of people who like to think that we, as a society, have evolved past that sort of thing.
They are wrong.
It simply doesn't exist. There is no actual space that could potentially contain actual objects or people. It's not another dimension you can just travel to; this isn't like frikking Tron. Cyberspace is nothing but a tired metaphor that simply will not die.
The reality is that when you go out onto the internet you don't go anywhere, any more than one of your friends is literally elsewhere when they are "on the phone." This wondrous machine we call the Internet is just a bunch of people interacting via horrifying, new communications devices, built right into the common computer. Cyberspace doesn't exist, because all the stuff that happens there actually happens right there in the computer in front of you, and others like it. The internet is just like the real world, too tiny to see, to vast to imagine, and too mundane to respect properly, because the internet is part of the world we live in.
Nevertheless, there are a lot of people out there who like to think that the internet is a real place, and that it has a different set of laws from the land of meat, plastic and wire. Not all of these people are criminals, at least not in the sense that people tend to think of internet criminals. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure the rules should be the same, whether you do something in person, by mail, or via the internet. There are some lawmakers who disagree.
The real piece of bullshit for today is in the war on piracy, or more precisely, the way it's being carried out. This is about, ICE seizing 82 domains, under a single court order, and refusing to say why, how or for whom.
There is no way that the judge who signed off on this made an informed decision regarding each and every one of those sites. Nobody would sign a court order closing 82 distinct brick and mortar book stores (or more closely chains of bookstores), because some suit says he's investigating the possibility that some of them are moving counterfeit books or pirated movies. That would be the height of insanity. It is insanity.
While I'd be glad to see Torrent Finder squirm (not because they aid pirates, but because they go about it in a sleazy way), I cannot condone these actions taken against them. Not only because are there reports of innocent file sharing sites, dedicated to the legal exchange of legal content (independent or hobbyist artists trading songs like DeviantArt users do with drawings), getting caught in the blast of this legal artillery strike, but because they should be prosecuted lawfully for their actual crimes. Accusations of piracy have become the new accusations of communism, and some people would like to see this turn into the same kind of media circus witch-hunt.
The war on piracy is a guerrilla war, the kind you have to win with hearts and minds instead of good AoE DPS, and as despicable as it is for pirates to use legitimate commerce as human shields, the moment the ICE rolls out the heavy ordinance they become another kind of villain. When two teams of bad guys go head to head, ordinary people like you and me get to be the collateral damage. As civilized people we can come up with a cleaner solution to this problem, that doesn't involve harassing innocent citizens and invading our civil liberties, just to inconvenience some pirates.
That's right, just to inconvenience them. Torrent Search was right back to sleazing up the internet within hours, with a four letter difference in their URL. Their ad revenue is still flowing, and they still get hits in Google searches that aren't looking for them. I hope those free music sharing hippies have the good sense to also not bother fighting this ineffectual legal attack, as I doubt they have the money to battle a court order.
This is a stupid, sloppy way of doing things, and that's important, because it's about to become the normal way of doing things. The EFF has the worst case scenarios outlined, and if nobody takes an interest in finding a better way, you can expect one, or all, of these scenarios to come true.
The internet needs to not be some lawless wilderness where no officer has jurisdiction, and the federal government needs to take the initiative, what with the network stretching across state lines. I just want the people who decide how this goes down to not be so stupid about it. I know, too much to ask.
These laws should be written carefully. We should slowly introduce minor regulations that help proper law enforcement enforce the existing laws, and not be afraid to repeal laws that aren't working out. This is new technology, and it's going to take experimentation to find the right set of rules. The right set of rules is intuitively linked to the set of rules that govern the rest of human interaction, and they will be enforced in the same way.
The internet needs laws, but the internet needs good laws that protect the people who use it and the companies they work for, not laws that cause fear of censorship and government harassment, while letting the guilty walk free. Things like DMCA (in effect) and COICA (in congress) are shoddy laws that will empower bad cops. I've lived in places where bad cops ran free, and that isn't the kind of place you want the internet to turn into, even if the internet isn't really a place.
It was the same way with every other scary new way for the people to exchange ideas. Printing presses, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, video games, etc. Terrified reactionaries take the first go, with book burnings and wire taps, and then it falls to the sane people of Earth to clean up their mess and regulate this strange new technology. There are a lot of people who like to think that we, as a society, have evolved past that sort of thing.
They are wrong.
Greetings
Welcome, to That Which Is...
I am not a man given to swearing, but I believe there comes a time when when you have to call a spade a spade. This is the place where I post when it comes time to call out the bullshit in current events.
A lot of what I discuss here will be about technology, but you can expect considerable doses of politics and popular entertainment to give texture to the proceedings. I might do something with religion, but discussing that on the internet is to invite a whole other kind of bull.
There's no update schedule, I'll pop in whenever I happen to be assailed by a wave of That Which Is...
I am not a man given to swearing, but I believe there comes a time when when you have to call a spade a spade. This is the place where I post when it comes time to call out the bullshit in current events.
A lot of what I discuss here will be about technology, but you can expect considerable doses of politics and popular entertainment to give texture to the proceedings. I might do something with religion, but discussing that on the internet is to invite a whole other kind of bull.
There's no update schedule, I'll pop in whenever I happen to be assailed by a wave of That Which Is...
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